Yelp Is Teaching Its Computers to See Places at Their Best

Frances Haugen was part of the first wave of people to use Google back in 1996. Her mother, a faculty member at the University of Iowa1, showed her the search engine, which was still a research project at Stanford University. Haugen was blown away at what Larry Page and Sergey Brin had built. “The idea that you could actually peer into a giant mountain of data was amazing,” she says.Haugen has been obsessed with search technology ever since. She landed a job at Google after college and spent several years working there, first as an engineer and later as a product manager. Now she works for Yelp. You might not think of the sprawling review site as a search company, but search really is at the core of what Yelp…